Archive for June, 2013

“How often do we think about aspect ratios? Better yet, how often do we think about where all of our aspect ratios came from and the storied cinematic histories from which they were born? It’s an interesting question, not only for the sake of being more informed about the technical history of cinema, but also for having a better understanding of the implications of various aspect ratios on your film’s aesthetic and story. Hit the jump for an extensive video lesson on the history of the aspect ratio.

Filmmaker IQ has produced an awesome and in-depth course called “Everything You Need to Know About Aspect Ratio“. The first lesson from their course is a sprawling 18 minute exposé with all of the aspect ratio history you could ever want.”

“As a cinematographer, one of my responsibilities is to craft the image to reinforce the story I am helping to tell. While lighting, framing, and camera movement are often the first tools that come to mind, an often over looked tool at our disposal is camera filtration. Unfortunately, with the rise of the digital age, and the power of our grading software, filtration at the camera level is not as popular as it once was. While I can appreciate the fear that some directors and productions have of baking in a look, here is why I think in camera filtration can be a powerful tool, and why you should be considering it for your production.”

“The Black Magic Cinema Camera (BMCC) announced at NAB 2012 in EOS mount, later announcing the MFT mount option in September 2012, is now readily available in both mount options. It’s been possible to get the EOS mount for a while now but B&H hasn’t had both models in stock until recently.

The camera features a 2.5K Micro-Four-Thirds active size sensor and shoots up to 30fps in ProRes 422HQ or uncompressed CinemaDNG to standard SSDs for $2995.

Blackmagic has added 2 new cameras to their line-up at NAB 2013, a S35 4K Cinema Camera (BMC4K), and the Pocket Camera (BMPCC). This brings the new camera company to having a total of 4 different cameras (two 2.5K models).”

“I think we all followed the progress of the Ikonoskop A-Cam dll camera, but sadly it seems not enough followed that up with handing over the folding stuff. So Ikonoskop has been forced to announce they have temporarily halted production of the A-Cam dll camera.

Can’t help but think of what if’s, Long haired Hipsters, ignored crocodile attacks, and that nag prancing in the corner; everyone’s stupid fail safe Kickstarter. Oh damn it now other DNG RAW cameras have the spotlight.

Ikonoskop had been dropping the price of the A-Cam dll Camera for months. Bugger didn’t help.

“One of the big advantages of the Sony F55 is its ability to record both RAW and HD at the same time (this is true of the F5 as well). When paired with the Sony AXS-R5 recorder, the F5/F55 can record 16-bit RAW data to AXS media cards, and HD video (MPEG2 or XAVC) to SxS cards. This gives you an easy-to-use offline editing format as well as an extremely high quality online Raw format at the same time. Workflows like this are used all the time these days, but the F5 & F55 make it particularly easy. For an in-depth look at this workflow in action, watch my two videos – in the first part above, I explain how to set up the camera for simultaneous recording, including how to add a LUT to the HD recording, and in the second video below, I complete the online/offline workflow, showing how to take a basic HD edit and match it back to the 4K RAW content.”

“Transferring terabytes or even petabytes of data on to server farms in “The Cloud” can take a long time, even if you have a very fast connection. Google are now following Amazon by offering a service where you can mail in your hard drive to be loaded into the Cloud.

There’s an old saying, “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of hard disks” and that’s just what we are talking about here. You may have your data securely backed up onto hard drives or LTO tape but there are advantages to putting into the cloud. Universal access and search capabilities being just two of them. But if your data runs into terabytes then the transfer times will be huge.

Google Cloud Storage has just started a limited preview of a service called “Offline disk import”

“Sony recently released a set of 4 cube LUT’s (Look Up Tables) for use with SLog2. You can download those LUT’s here: DaVinciResolveCubeFiles. In addition there are many other LUT’s that you can use with SLog2 to help create different looks. In this article I’m going to look at how you can use these both on set and in DaVinci Resolve. Currently on set you cannot upload LUT’s to the F55/F5 or FS700, so if you want to use the LUT’s to alter your monitor output you need to use some additional hardware. One of the most affordable solutions is the Black Magic Design HDLink Pro. This box has HDSDI inputs and outputs as well as other output options including DisplayPort to which you can connect either a DVI or HDMI monitor with the appropriate adapter.”